Saturday , November 2 2024
Home / Dirk Niepelt / Banks’ Response to Reserve Tiering

Banks’ Response to Reserve Tiering

Summary:
In a CEPR discussion paper, Andreas Fuster, Tan Schelling, and Pascal Towbin analyze how banks respond to changes in the threshold level above which reserves held at the central bank are charged negative interest: … exploiting an unexpected decision by the Swiss National Bank in September 2019 to change the threshold calculation without taking any other policy actions. This change led to a large increase in overall exemptions, but with variation across banks. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that banks that experience a larger increase in their exemption threshold tend to raise their SNB sight deposit holdings, funded through more interbank borrowing and more customer deposits. The interbank market is important for the funding choice: banks with low collateral

Topics:
Dirk Niepelt considers the following as important: , , , , ,

This could be interesting, too:

Marc Chandler writes China’s Politburo Validates and Extends Pivot while the US Dollar Sees Yesterday’s Gains Pared

Dirk Niepelt writes “Governments are bigger than ever. They are also more useless”

Marc Chandler writes Run on the Dollar Stalls after the Market Boosted Odds of another 50 bp Fed Cut

Marc Chandler writes China Goes Big, and Market (Initially) Gives it the Benefit of the Doubt

In a CEPR discussion paper, Andreas Fuster, Tan Schelling, and Pascal Towbin analyze how banks respond to changes in the threshold level above which reserves held at the central bank are charged negative interest:

… exploiting an unexpected decision by the Swiss National Bank in September 2019 to change the threshold calculation without taking any other policy actions. This change led to a large increase in overall exemptions, but with variation across banks. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that banks that experience a larger increase in their exemption threshold tend to raise their SNB sight deposit holdings, funded through more interbank borrowing and more customer deposits. The interbank market is important for the funding choice: banks with low collateral holdings (a proxy for market access) use less interbank borrowing and instead grow their customer deposits; they also pass on negative rates on a smaller share of their deposits. Effects on bank lending behavior are moderate; if anything, banks that benefit from a larger increase in the exemption threshold tend to charge higher spreads and take less risk.

Dirk Niepelt
Dirk Niepelt is Director of the Study Center Gerzensee and Professor at the University of Bern. A research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR, London), CESifo (Munich) research network member and member of the macroeconomic committee of the Verein für Socialpolitik, he served on the board of the Swiss Society of Economics and Statistics and was an invited professor at the University of Lausanne as well as a visiting professor at the Institute for International Economic Studies (IIES) at Stockholm University.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *